waiting for the barbarians

It will be very long before political subjects will be reduced to geometric certitude. At present the reasoning on them is a kind of arithmetic of infinity, when the best information, the coolest head, and clearest mind can only approach the truth. A cautious man should therefore give only sibylline predictions, if, indeed, he should hazard any. But I am not a cautious man. I therefore give it as my opinion that they will issue the paper currency, and substitute thereby depreciation in the place of bankruptcy, or, rather, suspension. Apropos of this currency, this papier terré, now mort et enterré, the Assembly have committed many blunders which are not to be wondered at. They have taken genius instead of reason for their guide, adopted experiment instead of experience, and wander in the dark because they prefer lightning to light.

Oh, that concluding sentence! Those old-time poet-statesmen make me swoon like a teenage girl. They weren’t just lawyers and they weren’t MBA’s: they had literary educations that included a knowledge of Greek and Latin. They knew poetry not as gut-spilling splotches of formless free verse but as a craft with a prosody that included rhyme and meter. They were taught to read it and write it, in English and the Classical languages. They didn’t have TV and the Internet so they had nothing to do with their spare time but read Shakespeare, Gibbon and Thucydides. Three cheers for progress! We have cable news and Twitter.

Aristotle told us that virtue taken to excess becomes a vice. “Liberalism has failed because liberalism has succeeded,” reads the first sentence of the conclusion of Patrick Deneen’s book Why Liberalism Failed, a study of the unintended consequences that Deneen claims were inherent in liberal philosophy from the beginning. Liberalism may have been virtuous in opposition to the divine right of kings and wars of religion, but having vanquished all recent ideological challengers, it has been able to uninterruptedly pursue its philosophical principles to excess, and thus become a vice.

At times, Deneen sounds positively Hegelian in his insistence that a 500-year-old political philosophy founded on the ideal of liberty from arbitrary and unjust authority is destined by its nature to dialectically produce its own antithesis in the form of a massive, invasive state responsible for the upkeep of millions of atomized, infantilized individuals in thrall to their boundless appetites. As a Marxist would say, the contradictions have been heightened, and now we near the inevitable collapse into what Deneen thinks most likely to be either an Orwellian administrative state, a military autocracy, or populist nationalist authoritarianism.

The social ills he describes certainly exist, of course. The question is how widespread, let alone inevitable or terminal, these ills are. Intellectuals in general are overly inclined to put the theoretical cart ahead of the practical horse, and conservative intellectuals are no exception. In theory, A may produce B which leads inexorably to C, but in practice, most people are inconsistent about connecting those logical dots and not particularly bothered about it. In other words, people are perfectly capable of adopting the aspects of liberalism which appeal to them, such as sexual liberation and increased consumer choice, while supplementing them with practices, such as community involvement, church attendance, and striving after virtue, which are, in theory, being crushed by the juggernaut set into motion by Hobbes and Locke. The selfish, short-sighted hedonism that Deneen takes to be illustrative of liberalism per se may eventually become integrated as just another stage in the typical life cycle of an individual, a sort of equivalent to the Amish Rumspringa, where people in their late teens and early twenties have to indulge their appetites in order to learn the hard way how empty that way of life is. Some would probably argue that this is already how things are. In politics, as in the natural world, mass extinction events are extremely rare; slow, piecemeal evolution is the rule. Liberalism will probably shed a few vestigial organs and grow some gangling appendages; the question of when it deserves a new Linnaean classification is only of interest to specialists.

Deneen repeatedly stresses that the conventional distinction between conservatives and liberals only masks the ways in which these two wings of liberalism act in tandem to advance its inner logic. The state and the market are like two competing apps, he says; the real problem is the operating system which in both cases promotes the satisfaction of impulsive appetites, restlessness, and the technical mastery of the natural world. Late in the book, he criticizes Charles Murray, a libertarian, for failing to see that the ills of liberalism can’t be tamed by “moral admonition” — no amount of moralizing can divert the wheels of runaway history. And yet, all Deneen offers in the conclusion are typical “crunchy con” suggestions for how to live while preparing for whatever follows liberalism. Murray, who is supposedly too captive to the logic of liberalism to think outside the Lockean box, has at least written a book suggesting ways in which citizens can practice a sort of passive resistance, or civil disobedience, while waiting for a sclerotic, overreaching state to collapse on itself. I hardly see enough difference between these two approaches worth elaborating, just as I hardly see any point in being exercised about what may or may not happen to liberalism over the next few generations. What will be, will be. We’ll muddle through like we always have.

That brings us to the category of Americans who are almost all on Twitter, Facebook, or both. We’re talking about America’s journalists. It’s a rare news reporter or editor or producer who doesn’t have a Twitter account and doesn’t get a lot of his or her news from these social media platforms. But the world is a big place, full of things and events and people and opinions that aren’t talked about or linked to by the accounts one follows on social media.

It’s worth reflecting on periodically — so much of what makes up the national “conversation” we’re having at any given moment, especially on the web, is the product of a tiny fraction of media figures, maybe a few hundred of them at most, chattering among themselves. Many of them are currently whining about how terrible it is that Twitter has expanded the character count from 140 to 280, because reading three or four sentences is clearly much more strenuous than reading one or two sentence fragments. And, as we’re increasingly learning, much of what they’re reacting to is the product of Russian troll farm disinformation anyway. It’s worth repeating frequently — why do we allow them to set the tempo, definitions, and boundaries of our thoughts?

Here’s why: because Orwell is the kind of revolutionary who actually seems like a guy you’d like to be around. He is human: complex, self-critical, and imperfect. He speaks the people’s language, not the People’s Language. He is the symbol of a left that could win, a left that is defined not by its benevolent tech behemoths or diverse corporate boardrooms or slightly-less brutal cops, but by its vision of the world that is genuinely different, a human-sized world where notions of right and wrong are more permissive than they are now (though traditions are still respected), where common sense is once again common (just less racist, sexist, or classist), where ordinary people can work decent jobs and have decent houses and live decent lives. He is perhaps the only thinker, living or dead, whose work could receive a fair hearing from everyone from libertarians to socialists to libertarian socialists. He shows us how to persuade people thoughtfully and lovingly… and how to recognize when there’s no choice but to run for the barricades. His thoughts exist in the quiet, unoccupied spaces that modern society seeks to banish from our minds. Rediscovering how to think like Orwell is the first step toward thinking both critically and kindly, which is itself the first step toward healing this battered world we live in.

These days she sees the story differently. Orwell’s novel is “a handbook for now,” she told me, and its central message is, “as young black kids are saying, ‘Stay woke.’ It’s about staying awake, staying rebellious, staying human. We’re in a power struggle to hold on to fact, to say, ‘This is a lie.’ If we keep doing that, we can defeat this.”

…Orwell’s 1984, dark as it is, prefers to regard the human spirit—its capacity to love—as rather a large thing that can endure much. This is perhaps why the book is finding a place in so many American homes. Yes, it is a warning, just as it was in 1949, but it also offers an example and a glint of light.

If there is hope, it lies in the prose.

While I wouldn’t go as far as Kristian Niemietz, I’d agree that Orwell is probably not destined to be remembered for much beyond 1984 and Animal Farm, and I say this after having recently read the four volumes of his collected essays, journalism and letters, much of which is still worth reading. Dead in 1950, his whole adult life was dominated by the importance of communism and fascism, which makes much of his output seem unfortunately dated by now. (Yes, I know, the media are endlessly hyping the idea that we’re living through the second Weimar era, but that tells us more about their jaded boredom and novelty-seeking than anything else.) And yes, there is quite a bit of special pleading in Orwell’s writing about the possibility of a “true” socialism that would somehow avoid the inevitable tyranny. I can forgive that in him, given his early expiration and his writing talent. But it’s just plain embarrassing to see Slater, who has both sixty-seven subsequent years of history to learn from and none of Orwell’s redeeming facility with the written word to fall back on, desperately grasping at the possibility of an imaginary socialism that has only ever been embodied in isolated individuals, fever dreams of Catalonia notwithstanding. “Current Affairs, publishing mawkish left-wing bodice-rippers that even Spiked would hesitate to touch, since 2015.”

The truly interesting thought is whether Orwell’s intellectual integrity would have survived disillusionment had he lived long enough to see what became of the socialist experiment. I suspect it might have, but then again, we have a contemporary example in Freddie deBoer of someone who undeniably has the integrity to clearly see the failings of his ideological comrades while still clinging to a strange faith in political miracles, so who knows?

If I am asked, what do you propose to substitute[…]? Practically, What have you to recommend? I answer at once, Nothing. The whole current and thought and feeling, the whole stream of human affairs, is setting with irresistible force in that direction. The old ways of living, many of which were just as bad in their time as any of our devices can be in ours, are breaking down all over Europe, and are floating this way and that like haycocks in a flood. Nor do I see why any wise man should expend much thought or trouble on trying to save their wrecks. The waters are out and no human force can turn them back, but I do not see why as we go with the stream we need sing Hallelujah to the river god. I am not so vain as to suppose that anything that I can say will do either good or harm to any perceptible degree, but an attempt to make a few neutral observations on a process which is all but universally spoken of with passion on one side or the other may interest a few readers.

Every single event in our public life is now instantly swept up into the centrifugal whirlwind of a political culture in which the center has completely failed to hold. Democrats are increasingly defined by their hatred of Republicans, just as Republicans manage to agree about little besides their loathing of Democrats…”A pox on both your houses” might not be a viable politics. But it’s a perfectly understandable response to the grotesque sideshow that American public life has become.

The iron law of oligarchy applies to social media as well. The web of ten to fifteen years ago might have held forth the illusion of an endlessly diverse, decentralized public square, but the inevitable centralization into huge media platforms soon took hold, and the Great a-Wokening of the 2010s (as future historians will surely call it) soon reduced most online writing to a monomaniacal obsession with virtue signaling and a barely-concealed longing for political holy war. It struck me the other day how there are almost no worthwhile independent blogs to be found anymore. People who, in 2007, might have been writing offbeat, interesting essays on Blogspot or WordPress have largely migrated to Twitter or Instagram to produce sentence fragments and snapshots. Those who still want to express thoughts which require some exposition would rather get their work published by the same couple dozen digital magazines and newspapers than “waste” their efforts on a personal blog. Discourse, like water, relentlessly seeks sea level. And so here we are, with the same media outlets publishing boring, interchangeable pieces on the same boring topics, ad nauseam.

The pessimism of Linker and Stephen seems well-grounded. There’s no way out, nothing you could “do” about it. Any hot take you could produce lamenting this state of affairs would only be adding more fuel to the inferno. Shut it off, starve it of oxygen, refuse to participate. Yes, yes, I know. I too have seen the accusations that the ability to ignore politics, or the desire to preserve some small cultural space free of political posturing, is itself an example of white privilege, etc. etc. But if you take the bait, then they’ve got you back where they want you, and you’re arguing on their terms again. If there’s going to be an alternative, isolated individuals will have to create and embody it themselves, in anonymity, if need be.

Emerson once noted about Thoreau that he seemed to need some sort of opposition, or challenge, to bring out the best in his writing or thinking. Though I’d love to be talented or creative enough to generate interesting ideas purely from my own observations and imagination, I fear I’m the same way — it’s much easier to find inspiration in disagreement. Not all opposition is created equal, though. Pascal Bruckner helpfully differentiated between “useful enemies that make you fertile and sterile enemies that wear you out.” The social-justice left and the Trumpist right are the very definition of sterile enemies, and between them, unfortunately, they’ve poisoned most of the media landscape. Nothing suitable for consumption grows there anymore. I’m not vain enough either to think that anything I say could make a difference, but perhaps I can also keep trying to unearth a few observations to interest a few readers. In the midst of this media wasteland, thank God for books.

I fear that the truth is Islam has become an untouchable shibboleth for some on the left. What they lacerate in other religions, they refuse to mention in Islam. Sexism, homophobia, the death penalty for apostasy … all of this is to be rationalized if the alternative is Islamophobia. Why, one wonders? Is it because Muslims are a small minority? But the same could be said for Jews. My best guess is simply that, for the far left, anything that is predominantly “of color” is preferable to anything, like Judaism and Christianity, that can usually be described as “white.” That’s how “intersectionality” can be used to defend what would otherwise be indefensible. The preoccupation with race on the far left is now so deep, in other words, it’s becoming simply an inversion of that on the far right.

To be more specific, the proximate preoccupation is with race, but the ultimate preoccupation is with moral authority, as Shelby Steele has helpfully described over the course of several books. As many have noted, the loudest voices denouncing all things “white” typically issue forth from…white people. These White Wokies have no problem with dropping their ostensible racial sensitivity the moment a member of an officially oppressed group dares to disagree with their progressive axioms. It’s about politics and power, just as it’s always been. Race is just an effective tactic for the time being. The only people “of color” who matter are the ones who are content to let the Wokies stay in charge. Cosmetic diversity flowers while ideology marches in lockstep.

In the aggregate logic of progressivism, Team White/Male/Etc. has been running up the score on Team Everybody Else for several hundred years, so the duty of the Enlightened Elect is to encourage and amplify millions of tiny, everyday incidents which can be vaguely construed as The Subaltern scoring one against White/Male/Etc. Supremacy, helping to cancel out the unjust privileges inherited from history. The cumulative effect will be to even the sociopolitical score sometime in the distant future, at which point…the games can re-commence on a level playing field? Just kidding, of course. At that point, behavior will have to be even more tightly supervised and controlled for fear of all our hard work getting undone. Don’t worry, our Wokie overlords will tell us when we reach the promised land and Year Zero begins. Now keep marching.

There are any number of reasons why people feel this way, historical and political. But one of the main reasons they feel like this is because of the internet, particularly social media’s effect on the way news is created and delivered to you. And how all of this has warped the experience of those who have lived through these social changes. It isn’t just about politics either, but almost every dimension of human experience. Do you love architecture? Someone just built a monstrosity next to a building you loved. Click here. Do you adore products by Apple? Well, they’re screwing them up. Click here. Did you just feel that unnamable, almost unmentionable surge of gratitude for all the people you’ve known in life and all the kindnesses their presence brought to you? Click here and see that most of them have contemptibly dumb opinions about everything.

The internet doesn’t coddle you in a comforting information bubble. It imprisons you in an information cell and closes the walls in on you by a few microns every day. It works with your friends and the major media on the outside to make a study of your worst suspicions about the world and the society you live in. Then it finds the living embodiments of these fears and turns them into your cell mates. And good heavens it is efficient.

Like a magnifying glass held over an anthill, social media focuses an intense, disproportionate amount of our energy and attention on trivial objects and events. Or like a classic Tragedy of the Commons-collective action problem, we’re all individually incentivized to dump just a little bit of negativity into the web, whether it’s by writing a vituperative blog post or sharing the latest outrageous “OMG, you’re not going to believe what this idiot said” with a friend. Collectively, though, we all become worse off as our news and information stream becomes increasingly polluted by garbage and bile. How do you change the incentives, then?

Last year, I had lunch with an old friend. He had become increasingly embittered by politics in the last few years, and he spent part of this conversation fuming about Obama and Bush, claiming that they were two of the absolute worst presidents we’d ever had. But, I replied, don’t you think it just seems that way because we know so much more about them? If modern mass media had existed to scrutinize the previous few dozen presidents on a microscopic basis, don’t you think that we’d have been similarly convinced that they were hastening the End of Days too? Do we honestly have the context and perspective to meaningfully judge such recent actions yet?

I recently saw a conservative writer summarize the presidency of Bill Clinton by saying, essentially, “shrug, yawn.” His verdict was that Clinton was fortunate to occupy the office during a relatively calm period of peace and prosperity between the end of the Cold War and the start of the War on Terror. The dot-com boom and the tail end of the abundance created by the neoliberal shift in the ’70s and ’80s meant that Clinton only had to keep the ship of state cruising on course. History will apparently only register him as an unremarkable footnote to the end of a much more interesting century.

Now, I’m speaking here from the dead center of Generation X. That is, I was a young adult when Clinton took office, and if he is indeed destined to be remembered as a talented-but-unexceptional politician who didn’t have much lasting influence, you wouldn’t have guessed it then. My perspective may be skewed a bit by virtue of my membership in a family of rabid Clinton-haters, but I clearly remember Republicans generally acting as if he represented the death of virtue in general and everything good about America in particular. But it wasn’t just the deranged conspiracy-theorizing of his enemies that we can see reflected in the level of discourse on blogs and tweets today — I also remember when he did a live town hall-style event on MTV, where one young woman, who had clearly absorbed plenty of media narratives in her time, informed him that the recent suicide of Kurt Cobain symbolized the hopelessness and frustration that a lot of us in this generation felt, and wondered what encouragement he might have to offer. I don’t remember his boilerplate answer, but the point is, this common theme of a young generation facing an uncertain future full of anxiety, career insecurity, and financial decline was overdone then, and we didn’t even have the Internet to perpetuate it. How long would it take me to find an article written within the last week bemoaning the inability of millennials to find satisfying work and middle-class security in a topsy-turvy world? Probably less than a minute. But don’t worry, kids, they wrote the same articles about us, and we seem to be getting by okay. And less than two decades later, the man who represented the decline and fall of America is now seen as a humdrum symbol of the good old days. Why should we believe that things will be significantly different two decades from now?

In middle-school social studies class, we were taught how to watch and read the news while critically reflecting on it. One important lesson our teachers stressed was that the reason so much news seems horrible is because it’s the exception. Good news is too common to bother reporting on. Paradoxically, though, when the exceptions get concentrated into a compact, regular delivery system, it starts to overwhelm our perspective and seem like the norm. We all know this, but it’s boring to remind ourselves of it, and the latest outrage hits us right in our amygdala and gets our adrenaline pumping, which makes us feel so alive. Even if we feel sick soon after. I don’t know if there’s any systemic solution to the problem. On a personal level, all I can think to do is to seek out better sources of information, like books, which grant wider, deeper perspectives than the chirm of social media, and to use them as inspiration to write after a period of reflection, rather than indulging in reflexive ranting. Put down the magnifying glass and try looking through a telescope for a change.

What does the accidental hillbilly prophet see in Trump Nation’s future? Vance forecasts a great deal of instability ahead with challenges that he is not sure either party is capable of meeting. Come what may, though, the Hillbilly Elegy experience convinced its author that he has a calling to leave the world of high finance to take a hands-on role in helping to solve the social crisis his bestselling book so powerfully describes.

…His book’s success filled Vance with a sense of gratitude and mission. As detailed in Hillbilly Elegy, loyalty is both a signature virtue and vice of the Scots-Irish Appalachians from whom he is descended. Vance can’t shake the sense that he owes it to his people to go back home and do what he can to help.

The fresh-faced, Yale-educated hillbilly lawyer is the second most unlikely political star to emerge from this bizarre year. More than a few people have speculated that Vance has a political career ahead of him. For now, J.D. Vance is focused on bringing hope and change to the Rust Belt through the means of civil society.

“The idea of a political career strikes me as a little odd, simply because I think politicians should have at least the prospect of gainful employment outside of government,” he says. “For now, the plan is to move home and try to give back a little. I’m going to start with a little nonprofit that will focus on this dreadful opioid epidemic, and maybe a couple of other issues.”

In the meantime, Freddie deBoer, who recently called Vance — along with millions of other people, by association — his “enemy” for daring to believe — based on Vance’s own experience, may I remind you — that the various social ills plaguing rural, red-state America would not be solved purely by more socialist policy clichés, took a break from crafting his 3,298th variation on a blog post theme — you know, the one where he complains that social media is overflowing with ersatz leftists who only care about signaling instead of seizing control of the state — to sigh dramatically on Twitter — which he had only recently declared to be an unconstructive way to engage with the world — about all the ersatz leftists who monopolize social media discourse and dissipate everyone’s energy into signaling instead of promoting direct action. Well, from each according to his ability, and all that.

I hate to discourage a welcome moment of self-awareness, but back in the day, I heard plenty of Democrats convincing themselves that Bush and Cheney were also fascists — excuseme, “fashists” — who would refuse to leave office at the end of their term. Come back when you’ve got a bronze political sobriety chip, and maybe we’ll see about letting you attend gatherings again.

I write in my notebook with the intention of stimulating good conversation, hoping that it will also be of use to some fellow traveler. But perhaps my notes are mere drunken chatter, the incoherent babbling of a dreamer. If so, read them as such.

Vox Populi

The prose is immaculate. [You] should be an English teacher…Do keep writing; you should get paid for it, but that’s hard to find.

—Noel

You are such a fantastic writer! I’m with Noel; your mad writing skills could lead to income.

—Sandi

WOW – I’m all ready to yell “FUCK YOU MAN” and I didn’t get through the first paragraph.

—Anonymous

You strike me as being too versatile to confine yourself to a single vein. You have such exceptional talent as a writer. Your style reminds me of Swift in its combination of ferocity and wit, and your metaphors manage to be vivid, accurate and original at the same time, a rare feat. Plus you’re funny as hell. So, my point is that what you actually write about is, in a sense, secondary. It’s the way you write that’s impressive, and never more convincingly than when you don’t even think you’re writing — I mean when you’re relaxed and expressing yourself spontaneously.

—Arthur

Posts like yours would be better if you read the posts you critique more carefully…I’ve yet to see anyone else misread or mischaracterize my post in the manner you have.

—Battochio

You truly have an incredible gift for clear thought expressed in the written word. You write the way people talk.